But who knows the fate of his bones, or how often he is to be buried ?

Who hath the oracle of his ashes, or whither they are to be scattered ? Hydriotaphia, Sir Thomas Browne.

The body-snatcher is a type of felon happily obsolete in our criminal practice, save for one signal instance, since the passing of the Anatomy Act in 1832. Prior to the introduction of Warburton's Bill, Scotland had paid a high price for the pre- eminence of her medical schools in the outraged feelings of the living and the violated sepulchres of the dead. The revelation of the hideous traffic driven by Burke and Hare, that hellish partnership whose transactions horrified mankind, at length roused the nation from its apathy. Science, wilfully blind or culpably incompetent, had seen nothing amiss, and as the doctors either would or could give no aid in securing the conviction of the murderers. Justice was forced to loose her hold on the more fiendish of the pair, lest both miscreants should escape unpunished. Legislation followed, to render need- less and unremunerative for the future a form of sacrilege which had made possible the perpetration of such fearful crimes. The methods of the professional resurrectionist became but an unclean memory, and only the ugly iron mortsafes in our older graveyards served as reminders of his power in the past.

When, therefore, on 3rd December 1881, the readers of the daily journals learned, some twelve months after the death and burial of the late Earl of Crawford and Balcarres, that his remains had been stolen from the family vault at Dunecht House, near Aberdeen, in circumstances inexplicable and mysterious, the excitement throughout the country was intense........read more